PAX: Guild Wars 2 Overview Part 1: Supporting the Community and Designing Dynamic Events

Introduction


Coming back from PAX, I'll be writing a series about the various things I was privileged to see and learn about.  I'll be writing it in three parts.  Apologies for not writing the last article on evaluating my warhammer tactics as a leader using Sun Tzu yet.  Real life kept me too busy and PAX was upon me before I knew it.  I will get it done once I'm done with PAX: Guild Wars 2 Overview Part 3.

From left to right: Robert Land, Troy Hewitt, Andy Belford,
Martin Kerstein, and Regina Buenaobra



You may be wondering why make a blog post about PAX in general when my blog focuses mainly on PvP and the use of informed tactics.  The point of this blog in my mind is the spread of and making good use of information.  "Don't Fight In Darkness"'s primary meaning is to not engage in battle without foreknowledge, but in my mind it also can mean information gathering is necessary before making any decisions, not just martial in nature.  In general I'll be discussing in this blog anything related to Gaiscioch, a guild I'm a part of or Guild Wars 2's PvP, but in this blog post, I'll be going over two PAX panels I went to that both have a very large impact on either subject.  Without a good community, guilds don't matter as much and WvWvW will be much more difficult to be successful at.  The first panel's focus was about how different NCSoft Games are trying to support gaming communities within their game.

Supporting the Communities within the Community

I was lucky enough to meet some very key figures in the NCSoft Community Manager realm.  Arenanet's Martin Kerstein (Community Team Lead) & Regina Buenaobra (Community Manager), Paragon's Andy "Zwillinger" Belford (Community Manager), and Carbine Studio's Robert "Robeardo" Land (Community Manager) & Troy "Aether" Hewitt (Producer) were all there to discuss how they had worked with gaming communities in the past and what they saw as promising opportunities in the future.

Relevance to other Guild leaders

Before I get into what the panel discussed, I feel like I should give some background information on why I was there.  Gaiscioch, a guild I joined in 2009, is a guild that's built about one major thing: community.  Once we join a game as a guild, everything we do is targeted to help support and encourage engagement and fun within that community.  I joined it because of that number one reason when I decided to give Warhammer a second chance.  As I mature as a gamer, I am coming to realize, while it's fun to get the "best" gear and be the top dog, that no game lasts forever and/or you can't be top dog forever.  At some point, all that work you did to become #1 vanishes when that game code is deleted (game dies off) or upgraded (ie expansions).  When it comes down to it, the community and how much I enjoyed that community will keep me logging into an mmo long after I have consumed the game's content.  So for me as a guild officer, going to this panel and being able to "peek" into different community manager's heads and see what they had to deal with on a daily and personal level was a real treat and will help me better create community driven events in the coming future. 

Favorite Community?

The panel opened up talking about their favorite or least favorite parts of communities.  Andy really got interested in communities with Asheron Call's PvP community and really loves the communities in City of Heroes and also jested "do catgirls count?"  You City of Hero folks probably will understand this comment better than me.  Robert revealed his preferance was the social scene inside town and would wander around, but if he was "outside," he tended to play more independently.  Troy's main fascination focused on the PvE and PvP communities and how they tended to loathe each other and how community managers had to deal with that micro culture so that both communities are happy. 

Managing and Encouraging Communities

From here, we segued from the panel's favorite communities into how to properly handle or manage them. Martin mentioned that he enjoyed the feel of the pvp community like some of the other panelists, but has noticed various communities need to be dealt with in very different ways.  For instance, he mentioned, as a moderator in the forums, he had to make sure he didn't cuss, was firm and not wishy washy, and use a "different voice."  If you didn't, players, and specifically pvp players, would tear you apart.  Andy jokingly added he prefered to "deflect and distract" while moderating the forums to manage players, but all jokes aside, he very much enjoyed helping create dialog between all players of all kinds.

He went on and discussed how, while players LOVED it when developers ran events, it was really a headache to do so.  It required a ton of logistics, time, and effort as a developer to run events.  Holiday events such as the ones in Ultima Online or Guild Wars that ran themselves were much easier to deal with.  The third way that most of the panel agreed was another easy way to help out was if the community itself ran event, the developer(s) could provide some small type of support such as adding a specific boss to kill at the end of the event, give out particular items anonymously, or help in other ways.  Andy mentioned that in City of Heroes (CoH), for instance, the developers would code in power suppression in a particular area for a limited time if they knew a costume party was going to be held there to prevent griefers from disrupting the party.  Troy added that one of the biggest reasons he went into the video game production business is because of the great events Ultima Online had back in the day.  Hear, hear! That's actually the #1 reason how I got hooked.  I can still remember a particular event where undead just poured forth from the graveyards for a whole 2 hours straight-probably was one of the most fun events I've EVER been a part of.

From the overall discussion, I got the feeling that the less the developer was actually "seen," the better.  In fact, Martin added that helping the community create and run events by giving them tools or by using developer tools to encourage events was much more successful in his experience.  In the past, he had tried engaging players in "person" inside the game itself and this mainly lead to disaster as chat would just explode with questions, unmanageable for any mere mortal to contend with.  Along with trying to answer too many questions, he added, inevitably you'd also end up with griefers that just showed up to make everyone's experience painful including the developer's.  In contract, Andy said with CoH, they approach the in-game relations a little differently with much more success.  At first, you tended to get just the scenario Martin mentioned, but if you showed up consistently and often enough, it became part of the game and helped bring the community closer together.  He added that this type of one on one interaction between developers and gamers tends to be more successful with smaller gaming communities such as the one in CoH, but the biggest key was mainly repetition. 

Guild Wars 2 and Guilds

The panel was sadly only 45 minutes long and it flew by.  Luckily my guild leader, Foghladha, and I got to grab Martin and talk to him a little bit one on one.  We talked about guilds and how they would exist in Guild Wars 2.  Martin mentioned that they had just started working on them and very little details were known at this point, but there were a few neat things that Eric Flannum had talked about earlier in PAX.  First off, you could have different characters in different guilds; you weren't going to be stuck with just having all your characters in one, single guild.  Second, as a guild, you could earn some type of influence or guild experience, and third, that influence could be spent on some type of guild tech tree, helping to specialize the guild as a whole.  He added that all of this was subject to change.  One last thing we asked him if there was a guild cap and he responded that they didn't yet know if there was going to be a guild size cap or how large that cap would be. 

All in all, it was a very fun experience and I learned a lot about what these guys and gals have to deal with as community managers.  The next panel I had to chance to see was about designing different parts of Guild Wars 2.

Designing Dynamic Systems and Content



From left to right: Mike Zarodojny, Colin Johanson,
Jonathon Sharp, and Isaiah Cartwright
(not pictured: Eric Flannum).



In another 45 minute long panel, we had the lucky chance to corner...err..talk to a variety of folks from the Guild Wars 2 development team including Eric "Commissioner of Common Sense" Flannum (Lead Designer), Isaiah Cartwright & Jonathon Sharp (System Designers), Colin Johanson (Content Designer), and Mike Zarodojny (Game Designer). 

Overall it was a mix of grab bag questions and answer as well as the team going over the process of skill design or event design. 

Skill Design process works something like this:

1. Come up with an idea for a skill.

2. Write all the skills on a post-it note.

3. Mix and match the post-it notes until you feel like they all fit each class fairly well.  Throw ones away that don't match any class.

4. Choose an individual skill to flesh out.

5. Is that skill more a weapon or utility skill?
6. Write a very simple, quick code to test the skill action in game and see how it plays.

7. If it makes it this far, what art effect does it need?

8. Send to QA.

9. Redo 3 through 8 based on feedback.

Event design isn't too dissimilar:

1. Brainstorm possible events depending on need.

2. Work with environmental artists to make sure basic map is completely ready.

3. Have prop artists make props for the event.

4. Figure out specifics of event (ie npc's involved, event triggers, etc)

5. Send to QA to see if the event is playing how the devs intended.

6. QA sends back formal feedback.

7. Add in "amazing" ideas here.

8. Redo 2 through 7 based on feedback.

The event design initial process can take from 6 hours to 3 days (ie steps 1-4), but the rest really depends on how many QA feedback iterations occur to finalize the event. 

Now onto the grab bag questions.

Q: What's the 8th profession?

A: (Much laughter) Eric Flannum: "We've announced 8 professions already! Remember the Commando?" (More laughter)

We will announce the 8th profession by the end of the year.

Q: Will there Guild Halls in Guild Wars 2?

A: Yes, but not at release.  We intend to have housing and Guild Halls at some point, but we will not have them at launch.  We need to focus on the items we've announced already and finish them.  But you can hold a castle or keep in WvWvW in the meantime.

Q: If I see an npc wearing a particular kind of armor or weapon, can I jump him to take said item? (Laughter)

A: We won't have anything like that in game.  With that said, a large percentage of npc's do use the same armor and weapon skins as players.  If you find a weapon or armor that a npc has that you really like, chances are there's a cheap knock off...err....player version that you can obtain.

Q: How many skills should we expect in Guild Wars 2 versus Guild Wars?

A: Right now GW2 has about 800 skills some of which are monster specific.  Currently Guild Wars has about 1300 skills due to all the expansions, but at launch GW had about 400 originally.

Q: What about variety of end game armor for Guild Wars 2? Should we expect more than Guild Wars?

A: In Guild Wars, we were limited by the fact that we had to make class specific armor and that tended to slow down the process.  Because armor is type based (ie heavy, medium, light), we can make a lot more in Guild Wars 2.  So if you're a Guardian, you can wear any kind of heavy armor, not just Guardian only armor.  So yes, overall, there's a lot more armor skins for Guild Wars 2.

Q: We know that there's not going to be the "Trinity" of healer/tank/dps in Guild Wars, but is there still going to be a rock/paper/scissors?

A: There's not going to be a "hard" set rock/paper/scissors because we have a much more complicated system.  We've built GW2 so that you're going to have to constantly react or constantly cause your opponent to react.  "It's like playing rock, paper, scissors with two fists..." quipped Colin Johanson.

Q: Are we going to be stuck with red or blue uniforms in structured pvp?

A: There will be uniforms for your team.  Default will be blue and red, but you can choose a different set or mix. 

That's all for now folks.  Hope you enjoyed my write up.  In the next few days, for Part 2, I'll be posting a list of questions that I had brought to PAX on behalf of myself and my guild as well as the answers.  Part 3 will involve me going over various parts of the PvP I saw while at PAX involving the good, bad, and ugly.  Stay tuned.